Hands Off the Wheel

By now, it can't be a surprise that the Drive-By Truckers' odds & ends album is better than most. The Fine Print - due out next week - is their sayonara to New West Records, who evidently were displeased with the decidedly un-big rock Brighter Than Creation's Dark. Fortunately, their sweepings and leftovers still have a lot of meat on them, but the greatest pleasure of the album might be that they've never seemed more relaxed or had more faith in the car to find its own way home.

The opener, "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues," presents them in their country rock mode addressing their cultural heritage, but they do so with a lighter touch, unable to escape the comic image of No-Show Jones on the riding lawnmower his struggles with modern technology. "Mrs. Klaus Kimono" almost mocks the band itself, bringing its love of foreboding to a horny elf that has the hots for Santa's wife. Even Hood's veteran-coming-home-legless song "Mama Bake a Pie" eases up. He sings the sardonic comeback, "Since I won't be walking / guess I'll save some money buying shoes" over an atypically bouncy, almost pop melody that prevents his saga of a life falling apart from becoming unbearable to listen to.

There are some unnecessary tracks. I don't think anybody needs to cut the covers they do live - they're better as surprises - but the versions of Tom Petty's "Rebels" and Warren Zevon's "Play It All Night Long" are good fun. Hood, Shonna Tucker and Jason Isbell each take a verse, but Dylan's words and sentiment suit Hood's vocal talents particularly well. The moralist, good ol' boy, punk, student, historian and smartass in him all come out in a perfectly unified vocal, much the same way that Dylan's one voice slyly incorporated many points of view. The other verses are good, but none are as revelatory as his.

Similarly, alternative versions are rarely special, and the world will keep spinning just fine whether anyone hears alternate versions of "Uncle Frank" and "Goode's Field Road," the latter of which churns along in the Truckers' default mode. Still, a slightly undersold vocal with less drama in the arrangement makes the song more chilling.

After "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues," the highlight is "The Great Car Dealer War," which sounds like it came from The Dirty South era. Like so much of that album - and the best DBT songs - it takes us into a mundane life that would be comic if not for the desperate choices their characters have to make to live in America these days. But the converse is also true; their grim moments have touches - like the song's title - that never let you forget that there's a joke in there somewhere. On The Fine Line, that nugget of humor, dark as it is, isn't buried as deeply as it is on other albums, and a lack of dread is welcome once in a while.

Growing Hole

At first I thought Booker T.'s collaboration with the Drive-By Truckers and Neil Young, Potato Hole, lumbered a bit too much for its own good. Now I love its weight as the electric guitars crunch with with as much distortion as they can carry, making Booker's organ sound even more glide-ready. Making organ-driven rock 'n' roll didn't seem like a good idea at first, but "Stomp it Out" finds his organ pulsing as authoritatively as the Truckers' power chords, and "Native New Yorker" spawns the sort of Neil Young solo we live for, and Booker follows his lead beautifully. The stunt song selections - "Hey Ya" and Tom Waits' "Get Behind the Mule" - seem gimmicky and unnecessary by comparison, and I'd say the same for the Truckers' "Space City" if Mike Cooley's vocal melody didn't mesh with Booker's sense of melody so seamlessly.

Drive-By Truckers in Baton Rouge

When Wall Street's in freefall, the housing market's a mess and economic uncertainty makes cranky bastards of us all, the band for the moment is the Drive-By Truckers. Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley specialize in the Battle Hymn of the Working Class, nowhere more precisely and powerfully than in last night's "People on the Moon," which benefitted from an arrangement that racheted up the tension during the verse.

Even before John Neff sat down at his pedal steel, the Truckers struck me as 21st Century Honky-Tonk band, playing the guitar rock that people drink, fight and fall in love to, and that was certainly the vibe last night at the Varsity, where three guys brawled like a wrecking ball through the crowd to my right, and one couple took every occasion to slow dance that they could find.

The set focused on Brighter Than Creation's Dark , and the fragmentary nature of the songs made them feel less like Big Rock and more short story-like - not what I always want from the Truckers, but it's a nice step away from precipice of Bigness for Bigness' Sake that they flirted with in song styles, song lengths, show lengths, and raw sonic poundage.

The oddity in the set was a cover of Tom Petty's "Rebels." At first, it seemed superfluous. Every song Hood and Cooley write is obviously southern, and there's no escaping the south in their voices. But in the set and in the Varsity, it was something smarter than that - it the interior monologue of the people in the songs and the people in the room. It was people finding a simple, fixed identity to claim and hang on to when everything else in their lives was unstable and complicated. It's a semi-truth that will do when you're not quite sure how rich assholes can fuck up on such a large scale that they get bailed out to the tune of billions while you can't get out of doghouse for getting drunk tailgating before the LSU game and puking in the window of your girlfriend's father's car.